Stoker 1.0 stars

For his first American film, South Korean director Chan-wook Park, best known to American audiences for The Vengeance Trilogy, cast Mia Wasikowska in the role generally reserved for a pale Asian chick whose face is frequently obscured by stringy black hair. A mysterious relation (Matthew Goode) shows up at his brother’s funeral to instantly assume the role of father to Wasikowska, the teenage niece he never met. (Nicole Kidman plays her teetering mom.) After the screening. a colleague confessed that the title’s allusion to Dracula, combined with Park’s previous film, Thirst, led him to believe Stoker was a vampire picture. One mention of an “Uncle Charlie” assured me beyond a shadow of a doubt that the only blood sucked was going to be out of Hitchcock’s veins. No matter how carefully the action is staged and lit, there is nothing we haven’t seen before. 2013.